Today I'm gonna show you how I light the foreground in my Astro photography shots
Sometimes when shooting at night you'll find that you'll be able to get a really
good exposure on the sky but then when it comes to the foreground it'll be flat
dark or noisy you can take one photo for the sky and another for the foreground
and then blend them afterwards but whenever I can I like to get everything
in one shot I'll basically use a torch car headlights or any other light
sources that are available if I've forgotten my torch I've always got the
light on the back of my iPhone now this is the torch that I use and the light
source doesn't seem that big but there's a technique that you can use to make the
camera think that the light source is actually bigger so I basically like to
paint my foregrounds the process is fairly straightforward basically you set
your camera to a long exposure using the five hundred rule if you're not sure
what that is click on the I in the corner you then get your torch out and
then start painting in the foreground there is a lot of trial and error with
this process sometimes you'll spilled too much light on the foreground and
it'll be overexposed sometimes it'll be patchy where you won't have an even
light source on the foreground and other times it will be a little bit too dark
however as you gain experience you'll learn what works and what doesn't you
want to look for textures and details that you can amplify with light I'll
normally start by shining the light on the foreground for about five to ten
seconds even if I'm doing a 30 second exposure and this is where you have to
experiment basically you want to balance the ambient light with your torch light
as I said these light sources are really small and if I take a photo and just
hold the light steady that's the size of the light that you'll get which will
produce a really hard sharp light if I move it around this will then give the
impression to the camera that the light is a lot bigger and longer and this is
how you get softer light another way that you can make the light source
bigger is to bounce it off a surface sometimes I'll shine it directly onto
the floor just behind the camera and this will give the impression of a
really big light source behind the camera basically you're following
general lighting principles the bigger the light source the softer the light
the smaller the light source the harder the light so when you're
shooting make sure you've got lots of time to experiment try the lights at 45
degrees try them at the same angle to the camera and try coming around as far
as possible as well as shining down or shining up on the subject lots of
different things can produce very different looks so I have a few
different lights that I use I have this one big torch which is quite bright so
when I turn it on it does chuck a lot of light on the subject
so what I'll tend to do with this is shine it for a few seconds and turn it
off I then have this which is a little dimmer and it's a very yellow light that
produces a very different look then I have a head torch and this is really
bright and sometimes you can take quite unique shots with this with the head
torch still on the head looking up and if there's a little bit of dust in the
atmosphere you can actually produce like a strip of light going up towards the
Milky Way another one that I sometimes use is my iPhone so if I turn the light
on on this when I forget all those other torches
I'll use this now this light is quite green and you can see a hint of green to
it now as it's shining into the camera when I do use my iPhone I then have to
post-process this color out of the final shot one other thing to take into
consideration are the light sources that are at the location that you've chosen
I've been to a few places where there's an antenna blinking on and off and other
locations where there's a road running past me every now and then a car will
pass and shine some light onto the foreground a lot of the times this can
be overexposed but if you're lucky and you get your settings right it can light
it really well when I'm out shooting I'll press the shutter button starting
the exposure and then I'll paint with my light this is the shot I got from
painting this much light on the ground I kept it in the same position and it
created quite a hard light I'll typically try different things with
different lights until I find one I like in this location I was keeping the light
low to emphasize the ripples in the sand this shows how experimental light
painting is with experience you'll start to know what works and
what doesn't so what you want to do is just try different things get a few
torches like the ones I've shown you make sure you have your phone with you
as well and it's on full charge and just play around with the light if you fill
the foreground with light and it's overexposed do the same again
but half the amount of time that you've shown that light for what I tend to do
is count the amount of seconds that I'm shining the light on the scene for if
five seconds is too much I'll do it two two and a half seconds which is in
effect having the amount of light in the scene so basically dropping the light by
one stop I'll keep doing this until I get a shot that I like then I'll change
the composition and start the whole process over again as I said with
experience you'll get to know what works and what doesn't one thing to take into
consideration is when you're shooting in a really really dark area what you might
find is your foreground is lit nicely the stars are exposed correctly but then
the mid-ground is really dark as long as the light rolls off nicely into the
distance there shouldn't be too much of a problem but sometimes you have to be
quite creative one thing that you can do is take a second exposure that's really
long let's lots of light in so then you can blend this in afterwards and
brighten up that mid-ground a little bit it doesn't need too much just enough to
bring a little bit of detail out in that area of the photograph and that's about
it there are basically two things that you want to take away from this tutorial
the first one is that you should be like painting your foreground and then the
second one is it's all about experimentation the more you experiment
and gain experience the more you'll know what works and what doesn't
as always if you like what you see give me a thumbs up if you didn't give me a
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you